Don't Make Your Hard Days Too Hard

A common refrain in the running and cycling communities these days is, "Make your hard days hard and your easy days easy." Is that good advice? It depends.

It's good advice if you're prone to making the mistake a lot of (especially young) athletes make: keeping too high a pace on your easy days. If, for example, you're supposed to do an easy run on Wednesday between speed and tempo days on Tuesday and Thursday, then that easy run should be kept at a low and very comfortable pace to avoid over-working your muscles. The two risks here are 1) injury from over-training, and 2) tiring your muscles out so much that you can't capitalize on the benefits of your harder training days. 

Point 2) is especially important, because getting faster or better at running or cycling depends on your ability to push really hard during your most difficult training sessions. You're less likely to improve your top speed if you're only ever giving it 75% of your effort. When training, you have to go into the red sometimes. What happens with some athletes is that they don't give themselves ample recovery on their easy days, so their muscles are still tired on Thursday from what they did on Tuesday, and thus they can't push themselves as hard on Thursday as they need to in order to improve.

That's the idea. Unfortunately these days, the "keep your hard days hard" crowd has taken that even further in saying that we should do our hard workouts and our strength training all on our hard days, and do only easy runs and yoga on our easy days. 

The problem with this new point of view is that the human body only has so much energy and ATP and all the rest of it; trying to pack seven different workouts into a single day is still going to subject your body to the same problem described in my Point 2) above. If you blast all your muscles with a hard weight training workout, you won't have as much energy to push hard during your sprint workout or tempo intervals. Also, vice-versa: it's hard to get much hypertrophy going on in your strength workout if you've already tapped your muscles with a hard workout on the bicycle. 

The solution is simple and obvious: weight train on easy days. The reason this works is because your easy run or ride will not really tax your muscles much, so you can afford to push during your strength training, knowing that it won't compromise the integrity of your run (and vice-versa). Moreover, working your core and/or your upper body on today's off day will still give your muscles ample recovery time for tomorrow's speed workout. You'll have about 24 hours to replenish your muscular glycogen, and your core and upper body are primarily playing supporting roles in your running and cycling training.

Naturally, this all assumes that you're training all things on an ongoing basis. As a middle-aged man, that works for me. I'm not training to win anything. If you're training to win something, though, then you're likely better off following a more traditional training cycle, in which you spend some time building muscle mass, then build your endurance base, then do some targeted speed work in support of your goal event, and then go through a period of rest and cross-training. But this is a full year-long training cycle, and if you're the kind of person who needs to do that, you probably already know and didn't need to read it on my blog. 😉

The Purple Bicycle

When I was in elementary school, the sport of mountain biking was just starting to gain mainstream traction, and given that I lived in Utah, you can only imagine what that would have been like for my peers and me. It was exciting.

I remember one store in my local shopping mall, called "Pedersen's Ski & Sports." (I Googled it just now, and it appears that the store still exists, although it has relocated from Provo to Layton, Utah.) Throughout the winter, the store was full of skis and ski boots, but during the warmer months, it was stocked bottom to top with bicycles. Bicycles of every color, shape, size, and price-point! It was not a fun "sporting goods store" to go into when I was into basketball, tennis, and soccer; but when I gained an interest in riding a new bicycle, Pedersen's was a dream world.

I had outgrown my old BMX bike and I wanted something really cool - a nice mountain bike with eighteen gears (more gears is better, right?) shock absorbers (new-fangled devices that I was amazed to find on a bicycle), hand-brakes, and everything else that a little kid might get excited about. One day, my family was at the mall, and I wandered into Pedersen's to look at the bicycles. My eyes gravitated to one that was a metallic grey in color that sort of color-faded into a deep, dark purple. I have no recollection of how good the actual bicycle was, but the color was mesmerizing. I was completely captivated by it.

For weeks and months, I would go with my parents to the mall on any conceivable pretense, just so that I could get another look at this bike. I would dream about it. I would ride around on my Walmart BMX, pretending that I was riding on this fantastic purple bike instead. I would sit and daydream about it. 

I was totally obsessed. It was a good obsession, though. It gave me something to dream about. It gave me something to hope for: maybe when my birthday or Christmas came, I would discover that my parents gave me an amazing purple bicycle. 

In hindsight, it doesn't matter to me at all that my parents ended up buying me a different bicycle. I was a little disappointed at the time, but what I ended up with was still a really fun, white bicycle that I faithfully rode for years and really loved. I got what I needed; the story has a happy ending.

However, this morning I was thinking about that purple bicycle in the context of dreaming about it. My white bicycle ended up being my next, beloved bicycle, but that purple bicycle was my dream. Every child deserves to dream about something. And what I realized was that I never would have had that dream in the first place, had I not grown up at a time and in a place where shopping malls existed and products could be displayed and demoed to random children window shopping as their parents ran errands.

Today, I shop almost entirely online. I don't step into a store if I can help it, because going into a store is an annoying waste of time for me. Besides, I can usually find a better price online, anyway. So, my life is much better now that I can avoid malls and stick to online retailers. 

I wonder how my kids feel about it, though. They don't have a frame of reference for going to malls and checking out what new toys exist, so they don't really know what they're missing out on. But I know that they're not getting as much exposure to the array of available toys and bicycles and items of interest as I did when I was their age. 

An ascetic might argue that they are able to content themselves with the simpler things they can easily access: drawing pads, educational lessons, Amazon Echo games, and so forth. But how much more fun might they be having if they had access to a dream? Again, the fondness I have for the memory of that purple bicycle wasn't that I actually got to own it and ride it every day. No, the fondness I have for that memory is that it was a really beautiful, simple dream for a young boy. I wanted a cool bike, and that was the coolest bike I had ever seen. And I allowed myself to dream about it every day.

What do my kids dream about if they don't pass by bicycle stores with purple bikes on display? That's for me to find out. And to nurture.

A Novelty Problem

There are many reasons why guitars are more popular than pianos. One is that, unless you happen to own a temperature controlled airport hanger, it is impossible to collect pianos. Not so for guitars. You could fit two dozen guitars into a standard-sized coat closet. There are also many different kinds of guitars, each one with its own unique sound, which justifies the purchase of another guitar. "I don't have that kind of guitar, and I need it to make that kind of sound!" They're also priced low enough that one can buy several guitars for the same amount of money as a piano. And then there's all the peripheral stuff that goes with the guitar: the straps, the strings, the pedals, the plectrums, each one with its own claim to improving your tone.

We see a similar thing in bicycles. It's not enough to buy and ride a bicycle. One also has to get the right kind of helmet, riding gear, water bottles, safety lights, fitness trackers, shoes, and so on. If a person decides to make the leap into bicycling, he'll eventually find himself investing in the sport as much as riding his bicycle, just as a guitar player will find himself investing in music gear as much as playing his actual guitar.

Golf, too, is similar. Once you've made the initial investment, there is always something more; a new driver, a better pair of shoes, a ball retriever... anything that will enhance the golf experience. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of club-swinging.

There are many such hobbies and sports. I've chosen to single-out male-oriented hobbies, but I could have mentioned their female equivalents, too. Do you really think women need to buy seventeen different kinds of skin cream, or five colors of eyeliner, or a different jacket for every type of cold weather, or five differently scented candles or soaps that can't be used together without causing some sort of olfactory overload? And, of course, the coed hobbies are the worst of all, since all dollars from sexes and genders can be exploited equally.

Marketeers are quite clever, and armed to the teeth with tools to extract more of your spending money. To be sure, in many cases, there are good reasons to spend more money on your hobby. One very simple reason is that it's fun to own a new guitar, bike, golf club, hair conditioner, or yoga mat. It's fun to complete your collection, to curate a perfect room full of enticing gear, sure to motivate you to do more of what you originally started out doing, anyway.

But if we're being honest, most of us should admit that we over-spend on our hobbies. A few of us will even admit that it would be better to spend less money. So, how do we resist the urge to spend money on fancy new stuff that will surely make us happy -- especially if we're spending within our means?

Here's one solution: Make part of the experience of your hobby the source of novelty, rather than the gear used to engage your hobby. Instead of buying a new guitar, learn something new on one of your guitars. Instead of buying a new bike, go on a new kind of bike ride. Instead of buying a new driver, go to the driving range and perfect your swing with your existing driver.

When we make incremental progress a source of novelty within our hobbies then we are less inclined to buy new things. The trick here is that the increment has to be a meaningful one. You can't simply learn a new song and expect that to replace your desire for a new guitar. Instead, you have to learn something that feels awesome and makes you want to do more of it. You have to learn a new technique, or play a lick you already know at a record speed. You have to impress yourself so much that you don't think a new guitar is as impressive as what you've just done. It's a little more work, but it's ultimately much more rewarding.

This is one of the reasons that children are such a joy. They can learn new things from existing, on-hand stuff and be entertained for hours; meanwhile, the same stuff would typically hold little appeal to us adults. This past weekend, I taught my daughter how to play a new card game. She doesn't usually play with cards, so the opportunity to play a game with dad, using a somewhat novel toy, was irresistible to her. I asked my wife if she wanted to play, and she emphatically said, "No, thanks." Truth be told, if it were only my wife and I, neither one of us would have chosen to play cards together. Those cards had been collecting dust in a closet for a long time. But then again, no one has offered to teach either of us a new card game.

So, my daughter didn't need to watch a new cartoon or a new movie, and she didn't need to buy a new toy. She just needed to expand her ability to play with our existing toys, namely, a deck of cards. It works the same around dinner time, too. She could sit and bore herself to death with cartoons or coloring pictures, or I could have her help me bake biscuits, or cookies, or peel carrots, or measure ingredients to put in the bowl. Things that I find to be relatively mundane, because I do them so often, are new and fun for my daughter. Not surprisingly, I recently found myself in a bookstore, perusing the cooking aisles for a source of new recipes -- something to make my mundane daily task of cooking everyone dinner more interesting. It took me fifteen minutes to realize that I didn't need to buy a new cookbook. I just needed to use the tablet I already own to look up some new recipes!

Again, to avoid seeking novelty in new stuff, seek incremental novelty in stuff you already have. Learning how to make falafel is a nice tool to have in the kit; it's enough to make a person excited to cook again. Learning a new guitar technique, or a better way of chipping onto the green, or a new card game, can all help you find the novelty you're seeking. We seek that novelty when we shop, but we don't need to. We simply need to avail ourselves of the novelty available in our life as it is now.

This relates to another concept I may or may not have mentioned on the blog: depth versus breadth of experience. Finding novelty in a new guitar makes your guitar-playing experience broader. But finding novelty in a new playing technique will make your experience deeper. I, for one, find that to be a positive move.

Click!

Ineffective training is hard. It leaves the athlete feeling tired and sore, as any tough training regimen will, but it also leaves the athlete feeling mentally drained, frustrated, and dispirited. It's difficult to keep following an ineffective plan because the athlete keeps giving more and more to his or her training, while the regimen continues to ask for more and gives nothing in return. It's awful.

Effective training is another matter entirely. Every workout seems to build on the one before it, even when the athlete doesn't have 100% to give that day. One still gets tired and sore, but the pain and fatigue feel manageable. Even as the athlete takes his or her first few strides in the workout, muscles and ligaments start to limber up, and within seconds, one feels like pushing harder. The more the athlete gives, the more the training regimen seems to give back. Everything seems light, fun, and easy. Arguably, there is no better feeling in life.

I have experienced both kinds of training this year. My heart rate zone half marathon training was a well-documented and colossal failure. Almost nothing about that training regimen felt right. I gave plenty of effort, and received little in return. I did manage, however, to re-acclimate myself to longer runs and twice-a-day running, both of which were important building blocks for what's been happening since.

What's been happening since has been wonderful. I took a little time off to gather my bearings; not a ton of off-time, really, but a few weeks of just getting miles in without bothering to train, per se. Then, I unwittingly stumbled upon a highly effective training strategy, and it's been reinvigorating my body to quite an unexpected degree.

What's different?

First of all, I've dedicated myself to one long bicycle workout per week. I've been doing this on Sunday mornings, first thing. These are three-hour rides or longer, so while the aerobic intensity is lower than I'd get with a long run, the duration is actually much longer. Cycling also works out different muscles than running does. This cross-training allows my running muscles to rest all day Sunday, despite more than three-hours of training. My legs and lungs feel fresh on Mondays even though I am still getting an amazing workout.

Second, I've decided to incorporate treadmill running into my weekly regimen. The hot and humid Texas summer prevents me from running much more than six miles at a time, without only about three or four of those miles available for speed work, before my body overheats and quits. Two weeks back, I started doing speed and tempo work indoors, on a treadmill, allowing me to crank up the intensity of my hard training days without having to fight the heat and inevitably lose. Since I still run outside on my easy days, I'm not compromising my outdoor running form. It's the best of both worlds.

I also don't feel too bad if I have to lose a running day to jumping rope, which is another activity I can do indoors or in the outdoor shade. It's not a running workout, but it's better than nothing, and it does my body a lot of good. Giving myself "permission" to do non-running workouts while still training as a runner has freed me of a lot of mental anguish and opened up a lot of training possibilities for me.

Finally, doing calisthenics at work has enabled me to actually ramp-up my strength training without having to dedicate an hour before or after work to a big second workout. I can drop and do 50 push-ups pretty much whenever I want, and as I've been working out, I've been writing down my repetitions and focusing on consistent forward progress. It's been working.

Sample Workout Week

• Monday: 45 push-ups every hour from 6:30 to 1:30; 1-mile brisk walk at 10:00 AM; 6-mile easy run at noon.
• Tuesday: 15 pull-ups every hour from 6:30 to 1:30; 1-mile brisk walk at 10:00 AM; 8-mile threshold run on the treadmill at noon.
• Wednesday: 45 push-ups every hour from 6:30 to 1:30; 1-mile brisk walk at 10:00 AM; 6-mile easy run at noon.
• Thursday: 15 pull-ups every hour from 6:30 to 1:30; 1-mile brisk walk at 10:00 AM; 10-mile tempo run on the treadmill at noon.
• Friday: 45 push-ups every hour from 6:30 to 1:30; 1-mile brisk walk at 10:00 AM; 6-mile easy run at noon.
• Saturday: 8-10 mile easy run early in the morning; walking or light swimming in the afternoon.
• Sunday: 40-mile bicycle ride early in the morning in HRZ 1 or 2; rest and hydration in the afternoon.

"The Best Tech"

There's a scene in the excellent True Fiction, by Lee Goldberg, in which one of the characters leans back in his chair and marvels at how the US intelligence forces have all "the best tech." It's a silly scene in a silly book, and I won't spoil it by delving too deeply into it. The reason I bring it up is because it's emblematic of a common belief about law enforcement in the United States: that their skills and technological prowess are on a level far superior to anything ordinary human beings can fathom. In the psyche of many Americans US law enforcement and military have taken on almost the same esteem of super-heroes.

I thought about this over the weekend, while I was riding my bicycle.

It was supposed to be a pair of relatively easy rides. For a week, I had been looking forward to exploring a bicycle path I'd recently heard about from a fellow cyclist. Meanwhile, it's long been a goal of mine to ride my bicycle from my house to a particular relative's house, some 30-40 miles away, across the metroplex. Last weekend, a friend of mine was having a music concert at a block party just off the bicycle path I wanted to explore; then, later that afternoon, my relative was having a house party of her own.

Perfect! I thought, I'll ride the twelve or so miles to see my friend's concert, then I'll ride from there to my relative's house, another twelve or thirteen miles from the concert. At less than thirty total miles of easy riding, I was disappointed that I wouldn't get a hard ride in, but happy about being able to "kill two birds with one stone" by exploring the new bike path and riding to my relative's house on the same day.

The ride to the concert was pleasant and uneventful. The concert was also very good. I hopped on my bicycle and started riding to my relative's house. I made it about halfway when I noticed that a major stretch of road had been closed, including an overpass above a major highway. I decided to try to ride through the closed road anyway. I went a few blocks before a police officer indicated with her siren that I needed to find another route. I waved acquiescence and turned onto a side-street to see whether I could find my way to the next overpass.

I rode for another 10 minutes or so before I finally realized that I needed the help of my GPS. I scanned for a route on my phone, found something I thought might work, and headed out. To my chagrin, my GPS map kept "resetting" the route to the shortest, most direct route: across the closed overpass. There was no way for me to find an alternate route. I decided to head back the way I came and ask the police officer for directions.

The officer and I talked for a while. To my surprise, when I asked her for directions, she pulled out her personal cell phone, fired up the Google Maps application, and showed me a 10-mile detour I'd have to take to get around the road closure. I thanked her and went on my way.

But: the officer didn't tell me anything I hadn't already learned looking at my own Google Maps app. In fact, as we were discussing possible routes, I also pulled out my phone and searched right along with her. The police don't seem to have any better sense of directions than anyone else, and it's all based on the same "tech." Their Google Maps is exactly the same as mine. I'm grateful to the officer for trying to help me, but I marvel at the fact that consumer technology and police technology are one and the same.

If anything, with more bicycling and route-finding experience on my end, I might have been the better one with finding a route.

While this, of course, "proves nothing," I think it is a good example of the fact that law enforcement is not necessarily any more technologically advanced than the average person. When libertarians occasionally suggest that certain government provisions could be painlessly eliminated, we are stereotypically presented with a confrontational question: "But without government, who would build the roads?" In this case, this "road" has been built by Google, and placed in the hands of consumers and government alike.

Hole In The Data

Over the years, I've really come to love cycling. As any cyclist will tell you, there is something magical about pedaling rapidly down a long, scenic road or path with the wind in your face and the sounds of the world around you. It is a thrilling way to travel, and a wonderful way to get some exercise.

In that spirit, I recently decided to incorporate a long bike ride into my weekly workout regimen, on Sundays, in lieu of a "rest day." Cycling is far less aerobically intensive than running, at least when you cycle like I do, and so it has the overall feel of an active rest day.

As longtime readers of this blog know, my bicycle is a single-speed Windsor Clockwork. Riding a single-speed bike means that my average and maximum speeds are limited on the upper end. While people riding multi-gear bicycles can easily achieve speeds above 30 miles per hour on flat ground, such speeds seem virtually impossible to me. That was an intentional choice, by the way; when I first started shopping for bicycles, I was so uncomfortable on thin-tired road racers that I wanted to cap my top speed as an added safety measure. It's hard to smash your face if you're never going fast enough to cause real damage in the first place. Another consequence of all this is that I tend to expend more physical effort at the same level of speed than riders with fancier bikes. Again, I knew this going into my initial purchase of a single-speed bicycle; having a more difficult time pedaling the bicycle means that I'll get a better workout than others. No "cheating" by down-shifting on the uphills, and 30 miles of riding is a good, hard ride for me. And, of course, the frame itself is made of steel; comfortable, durable, and inexpensive, yes, but certainly not light or fast.

In light of my bicycle's inherent challenges, I've set sane goals for my weekly ride. At some point in the future, I'd like to build up to a 50-mile ride,  A.K.A a "half-century." That would say something about my endurance on the bike. At another point (almost certainly not on a 50-mile ride!), I'd like to log a ride for which my average speed is 17 miles per hour. For me, these are do-able goals, and since I have no time constraints getting in my way, they're fun things to shoot for, good ways to add some focus to my cycling when otherwise I'd just be out riding for kicks.

Yesterday, I got up before dawn, at four o'clock in the morning, to be exact. I wanted to start riding before the heat kicked in, and I also wanted to be back in time for breakfast. I hit the road while it was still dark outside, attracting moths and gnats and bats. I rode through the industrial part of town, where roads are wide and sparsely trafficked on Sundays, then along the river here in the city to a few cultural landmarks before circling back through some of the nicer neighborhoods until I reached home.

I rolled up to my garage and my GPS had me at over 37 miles of cycling - my longest ride yet. I still had plenty of aerobic energy; the data from my ride shows that I spent almost all of the ride at or below heart rate zone 1. But, after 37 miles of single-speed work, my legs were exhausted. My quadriceps burned with lactic acid and they had long since lost their "bounce." I burned over 1,300 calories while riding and gave my leg muscles a good, hard workout. It felt great, and I'm already looking forward to next week's ride.

Reviewing my statistics on Strava and Garmin Connect, however, I was a little disappointed to find that my 37-mile ride, my longest ride ever, my great Sunday morning excursion, was basically scored as "no activity" in my health and fitness statistics. The reason is entirely a data classification issue.

That is, at both Strava and Garmin Connect, my primary activity type is set to "running." This is as it should be, of course, but the problem with that is that my fitness and training load statistics are thus calculated only from running activities, i.e. activities tagged explicitly as "running." I could do thirteen hours of intense bicycle intervals across 300 miles of tough terrain, and it wouldn't impact my "training load" or "fitness curve" at all. In fact, both my load and my fitness curve would decrease that day, since I would have failed to log a "running" activity.

Since I've grown accustomed to monitoring my training load using my Strava and Garmin accounts, I was chagrined to put in an awesome ride yesterday morning and not get a little numerical "boost" for my good, hard work. In some ways, this is a problem with the way these companies calculate their statistics.

In other ways, though, it is a purely epistemic problem. I don't need to log on to the internet to know that I had a great workout yesterday. I don't need to see my "fatigue curve" climb in order to know that my muscles are tired. I don't need to see a little trophy graphic to know that it was my longest ride ever and that I climbed more vertical feet than on any previous road ride. I don't need to see a "Relative Effort Score" of over 100 to know that my two-and-a-half-hour ride was more exhausting than last week's tempo run. But the brain sees numbers and processes them as cardinal values, anyway.

The truth is that I know how hard my ride was, what a great workout it was, how much good it did me as an athlete, and how much fun I had doing it. Internet algorithms might not know it, and internet kudos values might not reflect the intrinsic value of the ride to me. But this is one problem technology cannot solve. In at least this regard, we may have been better off in the days before GPS watches, when all we really had to go on was time, distance on the (paper, hard-copy) map, and the subjective fatigue we felt after the fact. We never felt bad about not showing a numerical improvement, because there were no numbers staring back at us. We had memories, instead.

Well, it's an epistemic problem, but not an insurmountable one. Just as the brain can be trained to think carefully about its cognitive biases and deliberately work against them, so can we train the brain to accept that internet fitness data is just there as a fun thing to track. It doesn't make or break your workouts, nor even a year's worth of workouts. We have more tangible means of assessing our progress. Sometimes the absence of an uptick in the data merely serves as a reminder to us that we should pay more attention to the physical sensation of exercise, and perhaps less attention to quantitative, algorithmically calculated benchmarks.

Happiness Is So Much Easier Than People Realize

This morning, as I boarded the elevator up to my office, a spotted another man headed over to the elevator car. I held the door for him and we both got in.

Spotting the large, black object I was carrying under my arm, the man asked me, "What is that thing?"

"It's a battery for an electric bike," I told him with a smile.

He interestedly perked up. "Oh yeah? That's cool."

"I carry it in with me, since these things are kind of expensive," I said. Then, realizing that we still had lots of time before our elevator stopped, and not wanting to be rude, I continued on, "It's a great way to zoom into work without getting sweaty."

"Oh, yeah! I bet!" he said. Then he asked me, "Do you live downtown?" I told him that I didn't, and then I described the neighborhood in which I live. His eyes went wide. "You mean up there, up the freeway?!" I smiled and nodded, and he started chuckling to himself. He said was impressed, and he thought it was really neat that I biked to work from there. Then, our elevator stopped at my floor, I wished him a good day, and off I went.

This is not an uncommon conversation for me to have. Sometimes it's the bicycle battery that initiates the conversation, sometimes it's my bike helmet, sometimes it's the fact that somebody saw me ride in. Whatever instigates things, these conversations never cease to impress me because of how fond people feel toward my bike commute; and the fact that I commute on an electric bicycle only seems to sweeten the deal.

I don't think they're impressed at the physicality of it. After all, riding an electric bicycle is not particularly physically exerting. The sense I have of what they tell me is that they just think it's cool to ride a bike to work, and that it's cool to ride an electric bicycle. They think it seems like a fun thing to do, and they appear to wish they could do it themselves. Their reaction toward me is a lot like the reaction you'd get from someone if you told them you just rode a really cool rollercoaster or something. It's appreciative excitement.

Needless to say, I happen to agree: I think biking to work is fun, and cool, and exciting, and I feel fortunate that I can do it. It brings a smile to my face; it's so much more fun than driving. It's a big increase in my quality of life.

Imagine how much fun the man I met in the elevator this morning could be having if he, too, owned an electric bicycle and used it to commute to work. It would no longer be an impressive thing to talk to me about; it would be something that other people would talk to him about. He could be the one feeling the wind on his face as he zips through the side-streets, the back routes, and the bike paths. He could be the one telling his colleagues how much fun it is to ride a beautiful machine like that to work every day. He could be the one saving gas money and wear and tear. He could be the one showing up to work with a big smile on his face.

All he has to do is buy a bike.

*        *        *

Memorial Day weekend was surprisingly great for me, too.

Saturday morning, we had to renew my daughter's passport in person at the passport office. That would typically be a real drag, and it was still pretty frustrating by the end of it. But we managed to spend some good, quality family time together. My daughter and I walked to the coffee shop and ordered coffee together. The passport office is located inside of the old Post Office, a large and historic building, built in 1933, right next to the train station. It's the kind of old building that has large stone columns, gargoyles, marble floors, and so on. It's truly a site to behold, and even gets pretty good ratings on Trip Advisor. If you have to be stuck in some government office somewhere, doing something annoying, I suppose a beautiful specimen of historic 20th Century architecture is the best place to do it. In the afternoon, we did typical weekend things: running, playing together, having dinner outside, watching a movie, and so on.

Sunday, we went to the pool. I had suggested it on Saturday, and my daughter was so excited about it that it was the first thing she asked to do when she woke up. The water was a little cold, because the sun was behind the clouds for most of the morning, but we nonetheless had a great time. In the afternoon, we split up; I went for a long run, while everyone else went to a backyard pool party/barbecue.

Then, on Monday, we joined our extended family at the lake for another barbecue. I went for a little trail run. We chatted and ate and had a great hang with our family and friends, then we came home, did the grocery shopping, and had another great evening of playing together, having a nice Sunday dinner together, and watching another movie.

That old post office is visible from one of the major freeways in the city, which means that hundreds of thousands of people drive past it every single day without stopping and snapping a few photos. There are coffee shops all over the place, but I seldom see fathers and daughters walking there hand-in-hand to spend some time together. My neighborhood has two different community swimming pools, with accompanying grills and tables and chaise lounge chairs, and mostly it's just a handful of families who use them. The lake we went to was enormous, with hundreds of picnic tables and charcoal grills, and although it was crowded, there were still plenty of tables to spare.

But the thing is, getting out in the sunshine and the trees, enjoying the scenic places, laughing and running around outside as a family, and making use of public amenities is so incredibly rewarding. And it's so simple. And practically free. Consider all the people who stayed indoors this weekend, or who mostly watched TV and went shopping, or all the people who wished they could have done more with their time. The fun my family and I had was simple, low-cost, easily obtained fun. It's not hard to come by, it's put right there for the taking. The really remarkable thing is how few people avail themselves of the opportunities.

*        *        *

By chance, I happened to have a conversation with a young friend of mine recently. She's been given an important opportunity to receive a lucrative scholarship and to earn an advanced degree. It's the kind of opportunity you get if you're a good, hard-working student who has a good relationship with your professors and who happens to be in the right place at the right time. Good for her!

This opportunity, however, is in another city, a few hours away. When I was speaking to her about her opportunity, that was the first thing she mentioned, that unfortunately it was in that city. But it's a good opportunity, and I wanted her to know that I was happy for her and that I wanted to encourage her, so I said, "That's a really cool city!" Yes, she said, she agreed, but she didn't have many friends there. "Oh, that's okay," I said, "sometimes it's good to strike out on your own in a new place like that!"  She reassured me that she wanted to take advantage of the opportunity, but she was "just saying" that she didn't want to move away from her friends.

I understand, of course. However, when someone tells me their good news, I am not in the habit of focusing on the negative side of it. So most of what I was saying was positive because I wanted to be happy with her about her great opportunity. I was surprised by the fact that most of what she seemed to want to talk about was the unpleasant fact that she'd have to move to a new city where she didn't have many friends. I agree that this can be unpleasant, but so long as I'm sharing good news with people, I prefer to focus on the positive.

Imagine how much happier she'd feel if she focused on the positive, rather than the prospect of being lonely.

*        *        *

Some people will react to all of this by thinking to themselves, "I'm glad you like your bike, Ryan, and your park, and your neighborhood pool, and your positive attitude. But that's not what everyone wants to do." I agree with this… to a point.

If you don't like riding a bike or going to a pool, that's not a big deal. But the more simple things you "just don't like to do," the more skeptical I am of your claim that you're doing the things that make you happy. If getting outside and doing stuff just doesn't do it for you, then you seriously ought to reconsider what it is that makes you happy, and if, indeed, you are happy at all.

The reason I say this is because I know so many people who waste their time doing things that honestly don't make them happy. I know lots of guys, for example, whose idea of a perfect weekend involves sitting in front of a television and drinking beer all day. One day like that every once in a while might be fun, but the truth is that drinking a lot of beer and sitting around all day - especially if you do it frequently - makes a person feel physically unpleasant, and there's only so much of that physical discomfort a person can feel before it affects their mental comfort as well. Similarly, a person might prefer to binge-watch the latest TV series or surf the internet all day, or play video games all day. A person might choose from any array of passive, mentally disengaging, indoor activities and/or high-calorie food and drink, and alcohol. On their own, there's nothing wrong with these activities. But when they become the majority of what you do with yourself in your free time, that's going to start wearing you down.

In the long term, though, these things don't nourish the soul. They're fine to do from time to time, but they shouldn't be most of what you do with your life. And I'm not saying that in a moral sense, I'm simply pointing out that getting outside and doing interesting things - whatever you like to do, as long as it is outside and interesting - will make you feel better than you do right now, no matter how good you already feel. Communion with nature is scientifically proven to improve mental health. We already know that outdoor activity is good for physical health. What a lot of people fail to realize is that it's also incredibly fun. And fun is a good thing for people to have. Fun makes us happy.

People are not particularly good at pursuing things that make them happy. People will play the what do you want to eat / I don't know what do you want to eat / I don't know what do you want to eat game until it crushes their very soul. And they'll do it night after night without realizing that the simple solution is to grab a rotisserie chicken and a veggie platter from the grocery store on the way to the park and have a picnic. It's simple. If nobody cares what they want to eat, then go do that! Come home an hour later with some fresh air in your lungs and a smile on your face.

Happiness is not a difficult thing to obtain. The little things you do in your free time show you how easy and low-cost it is to really enjoy yourself. They should also give you a little insight into what kinds of experiences you're leaving on the table. Get a bike, put on some running shoes, go for a picnic, go find a park or a community swimming pool. These are the things that will make you happy.

Getting Outside

Last night, I watched the movie Free Solo, which is a National Geographic documentary film about Alex Honnold's successful free solo climb of "El Capitan" in Yosemite National Park. The film has been positively reviewed elsewhere, and I won't do so here. My short review of the film can be summarized as follows: Free Solo is a wonderful film for people who have familiarity with rock climbing or the rock climbing community, while non-climbers may find the pace of the movie a little slow and will almost certainly miss out on some of the technical details of the climb. This movie is not merely "guy does amazing thing," it is specifically "guy who is an amazing climber does an amazing climbing thing." The better you understand climbing, the better you will appreciate the movie. That said, my wife enjoyed it, and she knows nothing about climbing.

Beyond the element of rock climbing in the movie, the film jolted my memory about a great many things I haven't been in touch with for a very long time. Watching the film, I was impressed by the rock climbing community, people who hang out at the same national parks and wilderness areas, pursuing the same outdoor hobbies, with a sort of similar attitude toward nature and toward technology. It's not merely a rock climbing community, it's a subset of the broader "outside" community.

This is a community that surrounded me as I grew up. It's impossible to avoid this community in Utah - or at least, it was when I lived there - because Utah is such a wonderfully special place for outdoor sports. In addition to featuring bar-none the best skiing in the entire world, Utah is home to impressive red rock formations that attract rock climbers and mountain bikers from all over the world. The northern part of the state is home to some of the best single-track mountain biking trails in the Rocky Mountains, along with plenty of limestone climbing routes, national and state parks, mountains for hiking and ice climbing, rivers for kayaking and fishing, reservoirs for boating, and endless routes for trail-running, camping, caving, and exploring. In short, if an outdoor sport exists, there are many beautiful places where you can do it in Utah. I am not sure that any other place in the world has so many great, world-class outdoor sporting locations as Utah does.

Consequently and unsurprisingly, the outdoor sporting community thrives there, so much so that when I moved away I slowly had to adjust to the fact that people who live in other places don't necessarily do something. In Utah, everyone does something. Some fish, some bike, some run, some climb, some ski, some camp, and some do more than one of the above, but everyone does something. Outside of that world, though, a lot of people don't do something. Outside of that world, it's not uncommon to meet people whose only real hobbies involve watching TV and eating. The point I'm trying to make here is that I literally didn't understand this until I left Utah, because I had never really met such people when I was there. The outside community is everywhere there. I hadn't realized how much I missed it until I watched Free Solo.

This outside community is an interesting group. They're a people who like to spend the majority of their time in nature, doing very low-fidelity things - they're campers, not glampers - but who are also extremely tech-savvy. In fact, the outside community has their own thriving world of gadgets and gizmos that many people don't know exist, but again, this is all in support of fundamentally low-tech passtimes. These are people who eat extremely healthy diets, and yet who are also stereotypically passionate about beer and coffee. They're among the most physically fit people in the whole world, and yet they spend little time in gyms and don't tend to bulk-up like body-builders. (Indeed, one of the more impressive things about Alex Honnold is how incredibly strong and muscular he is, despite his somewhat gangly appearance. That's not something you'd encounter in your average gym rat.) The gear they need to do their thing is horrendously expensive, as anyone who has tried to assemble the most basic, fundamental rock climbing kit can attest, and yet they are generally not a community of people who exude affluence or wealth.

Stepping into this world means stepping into a world of people who have made it a point to spend most of their time outside, and who have figured out the means to do so. Why run on a sidewalk when there is a trail available? Why take a car when you can take a bike? Why eat indoors when you can eat outdoors? Why sleep under a roof when you can sleep under the stars? It's a romantic world, borne out of the community's close proximity to the kind of wilderness that is capable of being enjoyed. That is, you're unlikely to meet a great outdoorsman living in the Sahara desert; you're much more likely to meet one at the foot of Mount Rainier. Like people who live on the coast and cannot imagine life in a place where one can wander miles without seeing a drop of water, so the outside community lives in places where there are copious trails and fun things to do outside, and they cannot fathom what it might be like to live in an urban center, or a flat, sprawling suburbia like you find in the South.

It's a great world, and I miss it. I like living in north Texas, but it would be nice to be able to transport my lifestyle and resources from here to a place closer to the community of people I grew up around. Maybe a better choice would be to make small changes to my own life, to see if I can enjoy a little more of that lifestyle than I otherwise would.

The Unaffordable Decadence Of Cycling

The trouble with a bicycle is that its two primary benefits are at odds with each other.

Bicycles are a technical marvel. The more one learns about bicycle mechanics the more impressive it seems. Or, perhaps the reality is that bicycles present various aspects of mechanics in ways that laymen like myself can easily understand. At any rate, the story of the development of the modern bicycle is a story of the development of the industrial revolution. We go from wooden frames propelled by legs on the ground, like a toddler's "balance bike" (they were called "dandy horses" at the time) to tubular frames and spoked wheels, to rear-drive "safety bicycles" with chain-driven hubs, to interchangeable parts and pneumatic tires… and so on. Every new development in the world of mass-production and industry has a corresponding development in the world of bicycles, to the point that even today the world's leaders in electric cars are also manufacturing futuristic electric bicycles.

In short, the bicycle is the ultimate case study in applied mechanics, and this plays directly into the first of the bicycle's two primary benefits: It is an extremely energy-efficient machine. This accounts for its popularity as a pure utilitarian means of transportation. Some estimates state that a bicycle traveling somewhere between 14 and 25 miles per hour requires the same amount of energy from the rider as the rider would spend walking. I don't know about you, but I certainly can't walk 14-25 miles per hour.

The bicycle's other primary benefit is, for the most part, totally unrelated to the first. Bicycles are extremely fun.

For those who do not ride, it's impossible to understand. No description can give it justice. Is it the act of balancing, or the ability to achieve high speeds in a short period of time, with minimal effort? Is it the wind in your face, or the gravity working with you as you lean into a turn? Is it the communion with nature, or the connection to the road? Perhaps it's all of those things. It is a multi-sensory experience that is continually satisfying, from beginning to end. Oh, sure, there are times when one must ascend a steep hill at great effort, or ride mile after mile into a strong and unforgiving headwind. That isn't always fun. Still, it isn't exactly miserable, either.

There's something magical about it. The same stretch of road looks and feels different from a bicycle than it does from a car. When you have a tactile connection to the slope of the hills and you can hear the birds, you find appreciation in a place that, from a car window, might look otherwise boring. You certainly won't discover a blue-jay's nest while speeding by an empty lot in a sedan at 45 miles per hour. On a bicycle, though, you might hear the jay's song, which will cause you to turn your head and catch it flying by; you follow it with your eyes until it lands in a tree up ahead, and then you take a look as you ride past, spotting the nest, the bird's mate, and possibly even hearing the chicks peep as they cry for food. All that in an empty lot, a potentially dirty lot, on an ugly side of town that makes you frown when you see it from your car. Bicycles give you access to the hidden lives of the city.

But that's romance. Bicycles also offer us thrills. Is there any better word than "thrilling" to describe the feeling of speeding down a long, steep, empty hill at speeds well exceeding 30 miles per hour, with nothing keeping you from scraping your face across the pavement than your own sense of balance and your ability to control your vehicle? There are many cyclists who make the trek miles and miles up a steep mountain road, solely so that they can have the experience of coasting back down it. We do this because we cannot help ourselves. It's dopamine, pure dopamine, pumping through our brains as we descend. To hell with the station wagons honking at us to move. They don't know what it's like, because they can't feel the wind on their faces.

It's almost worth the inevitably inhaled insect, although I could do without the coughing fit.

A bicycle's two primary benefits are its mechanical advantage and the fact that it is unbelievably fun to ride. These two features combine to present an experience that a rational person capable of riding will want to take advantage of at every available moment. In doing so, however, the rider must make a sacrifice. Riding a bicycle can be physically strenuous, but it's designed not to be. The whole point of bicyclical transportation is to avoid energy loss. That's why, in many countries, even old ladies ride bicycles. Bicycling itself won't make you a sweaty mess, not like a ten-mile run will. When you finally dismount, you'll feel a little wobbly, as if you've just been on a long boat ride; but it's not wobbly from physical expenditure, it's wobbly from having spent a long time atop a fast-moving gyroscope.

For some, lengthy bike rides might be a good form of fitness. It would certainly be better than nothing at all. But for someone who enjoys dedicating a lot of his free time to physical fitness, bike riding is a decadence I can seldom afford. I enjoy my "cross training days," when I can get out on a bicycle and just enjoy a ride. I don't have to worry about the workout I'm missing, because the point of the day is to rest my muscles and to give them a change of pace. But on an "on" day, who can afford to do something that's equivalent to walking? Even a very long walk can't give your muscles, heart, and lungs the same kind of workout that a run will. So, much to my chagrin, I must leave the bicycle home.

Still, I am a middle-aged man. I know that life is short, and virility even shorter. One day, I won't be able to run like I do, and on that day, I'll be glad to have my bicycle. It's a wonderful machine.

Holodeck, Here We Come

I watched Captain Marvel the day after opening day. As you can imagine, it was not easy to find three contiguous seats in the early evening for a massively popular movie. Still, I managed to do it by using Cinemark's mobile application, which enables you to see all possible reserved seats for all possible show times.

I didn't even have to sit on the front row (why do they even sell those seats?). I did, however, have to choose seats that seemed to be unwanted by most people: "D-Box seats." Prior to my arrival at the movie theater that evening, I had no idea what "D-Box seats" were, and the Cinemark website was decidedly vague on what I was in store for. As it turns out, they were kind of neat; I'm not sure that they were worth the extra ticket cost, but they definitely enhanced my movie-going experience.

You've probably experienced something like "D-Box seats" in a science museum before. Basically, the seats are bonded leather recliners attached to a mechanical platform that leans, turns, and vibrates in coordination with the movie. So, whenever there is a big explosion, the seats vibrate. Whenever there is a flying scene, the seats move and sway right along with the camera angles to make you feel like you're "there." I can imagine that in an iMax theater with 3-D glasses, the effect is quite incredible.

It was a good experience, and I recommend that anyone who likes action movies give it a try, at least once, to see whether it's "for you."

*        *        *

So "D-Box seat" technology exists.

Zwift also exists. Zwift is a pretty interesting phone/tablet app that can be used in conjunction with an indoor bicycle trainer, which is a contraption that you can attach in place of your road bike's rear wheel, so that your nice road bike functions like a spin bike, with varying levels of resistance. The way Zwift works is that it displays landscapes such as roads in Paris, London, New York City, and even imaginary landscapes, as you ride your indoor trainer. Within the Zwift application, you have an avatar, a cyclist who looks like you, with your name on it, that rides through these landscapes as you ride your indoor trainer. You can even see other Zwift riders' avatars as they ride along the same courses, and you can race against them or just ride with them.

It's an elegant combination of a racing video game, "Second Life," and indoor training. The workouts you do through Zwift can also be uploaded to Strava, complete with GPS information. So, at least digitally speaking, it's almost exactly like "being there." It's a novel and fun idea, and if I can ever justify the overhead cost of the necessary equipment, I might give it a try myself. It certainly looks like a good time.

*        *        *

Another thing that exists is virtual reality technology.

Lately a few companies have either released or announced the future release of new virtual reality technology. Oculus recently announced the "Rift S" package, which is a substantial technological upgrade from its existing Rift technology. Magic Leap, the virtual reality technology that has been promising big things for a few years now, finally looks like it's getting ready to deliver on its promise. And almost every higher-end smartphone is capable of limited virtual and augmented reality technology.

That includes, for example, Samsung's "Bixby Vision" app, which enables users to look through their phone's cameras and find out information about major landmarks, translate text written in foreign languages, shop for any item contained in the viewfinder, and so on.

The era of virtual reality, heralded since at least the 1980s, is almost upon us.

*        *        *

The so-called "Internet of Things" is something I have previously criticized for not being particularly useful, but it is a kind of technology that exists.

In particular, smart light-bulbs, smart speakers, and smart temperature thermostats can all be coordinated through a central hub - be it something like an Echo device or some other such central hub - to produce home ambiances that can enhance a person's quality of life. One oft-touted way of doing this would be to create a "scene," coordinating a variety of your home smart devices, that enhances your morning routine. With present and affordable technology, it is possible to set specific lighting throughout your home when it's time to wake up, turn on your favorite music at the correct volume and in the correct rooms in the house, turn on your coffee machine so that your coffee finishes brewing right as you step into the kitchen, and so on.

Or, you could set a homecoming routine, so that whenever your car arrives home from work, the garage door automatically opens, the house lights turn on, the temperature inside your home adjusts to your preference, the door unlocks to let you in, etc.

There are people who like to set up their homes this way because it's their hobby. Some of us like to run, some of us like to build model trains and dioramas, and some of us like to set up smart home technology. It's an expensive hobby for as little utility it brings to your daily routine, but for those who enjoy the process of making their homes high-tech, who am I to question?

The point is, this technology exists.

*        *        *

A few years before the internet was formally released to every household with a modem, Frank Zappa wrote in The Real Frank Zappa Book about how all of the underlying technology involving computers, telephony, and audio/video already existed. He envisions - and predicted - that this technology could be set up to deliver any kind of music or video to public consumers any time they wanted it. Ten years after he wrote about it, it was a blasé part of every-day life: the internet.

Now let's think about all of the technologies I've just listed above: virtual reality, smart home technology, virtual indoor bicycle training, and mechanized furniture that moves in conjunction with audiovisual cues.

Imagine that you built a room or a shed, equipped with its own HVAC, driven by a "Nest" smart thermostat. Imagine that the room temperature could be coordinated with the brightening and dimming of the interior lighting. Imagine that the temperature and lighting could both be triggered by audiovisual cues produced by virtual gaming system, with sounds coming from surround sound speakers installed throughout the room. Imagine that the floor of the room, or a small platform in the center of the room, was attached to a machine that gently vibrated, twisted, and leaned in conjunction with the same set of audiovisual cues, and that a person riding an bicycle trainer on the platform, or running on a treadmill on the platform, was wearing a virtual reality headset that could display any course on Zwift, or indeed any landscape available on Google Earth.

In such a room, a person could take a virtual tour of any such landscape, feeling the temperature of the air, the slopes of the landscapes, racing against other athletes from around the world, or even just taking a nice stroll around a foreign city; or perhaps even Mars!

The really amazing thing about all of this is that the technology already exists. Most of it is available at reasonable middle class prices. And my prediction is that VR rooms like this will be here very soon.

Holodeck, here we come.

Comparing Garmin's Training Status And Strava's Fitness & Freshness

There is nothing new about using biometric data to estimate an athlete's level of "fitness." Researchers have been perfecting various measurements of fitness for over forty years. But it wasn't until the advent of the fitness tracker or GPS watch that the underlying equations behind these measurements could be applied to the average weekend warrior. You won't find this data in Samsung Health, and likely not in Apple Health either, because those companies are more interested in producing consumer products for people who like to count steps and receive phone calls through their wrists. The companies that are serious about competitive training, though, do provide us with this data.

Every company that is interested in providing this kind of data to users has their own preferred approach. It is all more or less based on upon the same underlying principles, but it's served up slightly differently. The numbers mean slightly different things, depending on how they've been calculated. For our purposes here, I'll compare Garmin's "Training Status" and Strava's "Fitness & Freshness" measurements.

Both Training Status and Fitness & Freshness are calculated based primarily on moving averages of "Training Load," and both approaches are pretty interesting based on what the teams who designed them wanted to accomplish.

To be brief, "training load" is a measurement of how much exercise you've done recently, and how vigorous that exercise has been. "How much" is easy to determine simply by adding up how many hours, minutes, and seconds you've spent exercising over a given calendar period. "How vigorous" is a question that ultimately comes down to a physiologist's preferred measurement of workout intensity. Strava's team prefers to analyze heart rate data during exercise. The higher your heart rate, the harder you're exercising. Garmin's team, by contrast, prefers to measure exercising intensity with a slightly more technical analysis: excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). To that end, my guess is that Garmin estimates EPOC by analyzing how long it takes the athlete to recovery from a given exercise session.

Both of these measurements have pros and cons. One mark in Strava's favor is the relative simplicity of the calculation. Time + heart rate = load. (That's not the exact calculation, but you get the idea.) But the drawback to a calculation this simple is that anaerobic activity can increase a person's heart rate without doing much in the way of training load for, say, cycling. A competitive cyclist can get her heart rate up during a 30-minute arms workout without impacting her overall "training load" for cycling. In fact, she might go out for a 30-mile ride immediately following the arms workout without feeling too much different than she would have otherwise. By contrast, Garmin's EPOC calculation will capture that level of nuance here. That same cyclist's post-weight-lifting EPOC will be quite short compared to her 30-mile ride, and her Garmin-calculated Training Load will adjust accordingly.

But a mark against Garmin's concept of Training Load is that it fails to account for real-world factors. What I mean is, Garmin can't measure EPOC directly through biometric testing, so they estimate it through heart rate measurements. If I go for a ten-mile run, and then get caught in bad traffic on the drive home, Garmin's calculations will erroneously assume that I'm having a hard time recovering from my run, and my Training Load number will rise. If I take a nap or sit in a hot tub immediately following my run, I'll have a much better EPOC profile, and my Training Load number will fall. So different non-exercise circumstances can impact Garmin's estimate of Training Load even when they probably shouldn't.

To complete things, Garmin outputs a "Training Status," based on a 7-day moving average of Training Load combined with the athlete's VO2 max data. That's not a bad estimate, but there is a problem in that VO2 max is a measurement that doesn't tend to move much. When it does, it moves steadily over time; it doesn't tend to fluctuate a lot over a 7-day period. It likely doesn't change much at all in a week. Some of the underlying data used to estimate VO2 max, however, can change: namely, if you have a birthday this week, your age will change; if your weight tends to fluctuate based on water weight, or diet, or menstruation, or any of the other things that make small impacts to a person's weight, the number you see on the scale will change. These things can have a statistically relevant impact on the output of the VO2 max estimation equation. But remember: it's just an equation. It aims to estimate VO2 max. If your estimate changes by a point here and there, it's unlikely that your VO2 max actually changed. It's far more likely that you had some slight weight fluctuation or something.

The result of all this is a "Training Load" and "Training Status" output that is roughly on point, but somewhat confusing. Take a look at mine:

Over this period, I inexplicably vacillated between "productive" and "maintaining" before finally ending up at "unproductive." Then I went back to vacillating during my recovery week. It wasn't until the last three days that Garmin recognized I was actually recovering. And, I hasten to add, I am training under a training plan supplied by Garmin through the Garmin Connect app itself.

That said, Garmin did get things right in general. At the end of my third week of training, I had run nine consecutive days and was feeling tired, so "unproductive" might not be linguistically accurate, but it was certainly true that I needed some rest. And Garmin did recognize the recovery week eventually.

Strava's "Fitness & Freshness" curves are based on what they call an "impulse response model." That sounds fancy, but all it really means is that Strava uses a weighted moving average of training load based on activity duration and heart rate. Precisely how they choose to weight the moving average is a mystery to me, but when compared to Garmin's data, Strava's seems to place slightly more weight on the past. While Garmin states with certainty that their output is based on a 7-day moving average, Strava does not state how long their time window is. I would venture to guess, though, that their time window is three weeks.

Why three weeks? Because when you access Strava's "weekly effort" graphs from their mobile app (these graphs are strangely unavailable in the browser portal), the area denoting "consistent training" on the graph adjusts based on the previous three weeks. I can see this by watching how it moves with my week-to-week effort.

The result of this longer time window provides what I believe to be a better overall measure of a person's fitness level. Here's a piece of my Fitness and Fatigue curves, covering my recent training regimen:

As you can see, Strava tracked my fitness level as increasing over the first three weeks of training; then, during my recovery week, my fitness curve stayed relatively flat, while my fatigue curve fell. This is, at the least, an accurate representation of what my training schedule was supposed to achieve.

On the other hand, take a look at the local maximum in that graph. On March 10, I went for a long run and in doing so achieved a fitness level of 81, and a fatigue level of 114. How should an athlete interpret that kind of information? Strava supplies a third number, called "Form," which is nothing more than the arithmetic difference between Fitness and Fatigue. This should correspond to how "fresh" I was feeling that day. Using this data, I can say that I was fit, but fatigued. Strava seems to have accurately assessed my feelings. What they didn't do was give me a direct recommendation, as Garmin did. Garmin told me right then and there that my training was getting unproductive and I needed rest.

There is no "right answer" here. I find both sets of data useful in their own way. But I am a very atypical athlete. Most people who use GPS watches aren't used to calculating various weighted averages and applying statistical models to time series. It just so happens that I do this for a living, and my great familiarity with data science puts me at an advantage for interpreting calculations like these.

The average athlete -- i.e., the average person who does not work in data science -- needs a little more help interpreting this information. To that end, I can tell you this: Garmin's Training Load and Training Status numbers jump around a bit, because they only look at your most recent training week; but they tend to get close to a good recommendation if you're seeing the same output two or three days in a row. Meanwhile, Strava's Fitness & Freshness gives you good perspective in your overall response to training, but you should probably not take the data too seriously if you are not actively engaged in an actual training plan of some kind.

Always take this data with a grain of salt. But if you can manage to think like a biostatistician, you can get some good information out of these numbers.

I Like Being Physical

There was a rather good TED Talk a while back about the way bicycling can change your life. To be fair, putting it that way is a modest amount of hyperbole. Also to be fair, the man who gave the talk seems to favor social spending on bicycle paths, which is certainly a debatable political opinion. Still, the TED Talk is fundamentally a good one. 

Here it is:

What resonated for me about this presentation was the speaker's attempt to describe to non-cyclists what it's like ride your bike all over the place. People who like to ride bicycles will recognize what he's talking about immediately. People who seldom ride bicycles will not have as great an appreciation for what he says.

But the idea itself is good, and accurate. Let me take a stab at it.

*        *        *

When you cycle at higher speeds - fitness biking speeds - the sound of the wind blowing past your ears is one of the major sensory perceptions you have. When that sound is combined with the sound of passing cars, there is quite a lot of auditory "rushing" going on during a bike ride.

You won't always notice that rushing, though, because if you intend to ride safely, then much of your attention must be devoted to road conditions, to searching your field of vision for cars, for road debris, for dogs or wild animals to go running across the pavement in front of you. It's not harrowing, but it does require a good part of a person's concentration. 

Finally, if you're in the zone, what remaining mental energy you have left is devoted to having your mind wander. Everyone's wandering mind goes to a different place. Some of us like to appreciate the scenery around us, some of us like to quietly meditate as we ride, some of us like to go over our recent experiences, or our mental to-do lists... Whatever it is that you tend to think about, you'll think about it on a long bicycle ride.

So, between the rushing sounds and riding safely and letting your mind wander to enjoy the ride, bicycling can occupy your thoughts completely. It is a totally immersive mental and sensory experience, and it's not uncommon for cyclists to finish a long ride as mentally exhausted as they are physically. 

I vividly recall being in this mental state early on in my cycling experience, riding up along a sparsely populated, but somewhat industrial part of town. It was a Sunday morning, so there were few cars around and most of the factories and warehouses were closed for business, for the day.

The trains were still running, however, and as I rode, a train was passing along, in the same direction I was going, parallel to the road. As it passed, the wind died down and there was a lull in traffic; so the air suddenly grew very quiet. All I could hear was the sound of my breathing, the gentle hiss of my bike tires riding along the road, and the sound of the train passing by.

What struck me at that moment was how quiet the train was! Once the engine had passed, all I could really hear was the sound of the train cars, and train cars do not actually make that much noise. There was a small amount of metallic squeaking as the joints between the cars flexed over the train tracks, and perhaps a little rattling of cargo in some of the cars. Other than that, it was an incredibly quiet situation.

It occurred to me at that moment that if I were driving alongside the train in a car, the quiet that surrounded me would be imperceptible. Instead, my ears would be full of the sound of the car's engine, and whatever music or radio program was on the speakers. Even if I had turned the radio off and rolled my windows down, the wind blowing into the car would be the dominant sound. The peaceful, gentle creaking and swaying of the train is something I never would have noticed in a car.

On a bike, it was obvious. And wonderful.

*        *        *

The point of that possibly convoluted example is to illustrate the simple fact that we perceive the world differently on a bicycle than we do in a car. We perceive it differently still while running. Every method by which you choose to interact with the world meaningfully changes your perception of that world. I'd go so far as to say that someone running or cycling on the road exists in an entirely different world than a driver traveling the same road at the same time, at least in a psychological sense. 

There are so many things that make this true. Consider, for example, our perception of changes in elevation. Unless you're driving a car with a very weak engine, driving over hills is barely something to balk at. Other than changes to your field of vision, there is no major difference between driving uphill and driving on even terrain. On a bicycle or in a pair of running shoes, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Running or biking uphill is hard, and slows you down; running or biking downhill is easy, and speeds you up. Having changes in elevation reflected in your own physical effort changes the way you perceive hills and the surrounding terrain. In a very real sense, a hill means more when you're not driving.

Yesterday, I ran through a park, where a large group of grade school children were playing as part of a field trip of some kind. Little children were running around all over the grass, and as they did so, I heard many of the young girls making high-pitched squeals. It triggered my memories of being in grade school and hearing my classmates make similar squeals, and it made me smile and laugh. In a car, I would not have heard those squeals, and my perception of those kids would have been limited to sight. My memory wouldn't have been triggered. I wouldn't have smiled. I wouldn't have laughed. 

*        *        *

We miss so much of the world when we spend our time cooped-up in cars or stuck in front of television and computer screens. There are little things going on around us all the time, and it's amazing how many of those things we simply miss out on because we're not experiencing the world on a firsthand basis.

You need not run or bike in order to experience this, of course. You can have similar experiences walking or hiking or riding a scooter. I think it's great to be active and athletic, but that's not really the point of my post today. 

As being inside becomes increasingly more comfortable and entertaining, we're gradually changing our relationship to the physical world. In many ways, this is a tremendous boon. I, too, enjoy being comfortable and having a roof over my head. But I also like getting outside and having fun. I like hearing the sounds and smelling the aromas of the physical world. I like having a personal, one-on-one relationship with the world. I appreciate more than just architecture and convenience. I like the sunlight on my face and the wind in my hair. 

I like being physical.

Understanding And Using Strava's Relative Effort Score

Strava's "Relative Effort" score, which is available to those of us dorky enough to subscribe to their premium membership, is an interesting piece of data to think about.

While the exact formula for calculating Relative Effort is one of Strava's proprietary secrets, they readily acknowledge that it is based on the athlete's heart rate during exercise. When you click on your Relative Effort score for a particular activity (from the browser-based user portal), you are taken to an analysis of heart rate. Specifically, you're given a bar graph, by Heart Rate Zone, of percentage of time spent in each Zone. You're given extra points for time spent "in the red," which any time you spend in Heart Rate Zones 4 or 5. (This is all based on a 5-zone approach.)

Those of you familiar with the fitness industry will recognize this principle immediately. It's the "theory" behind Orange Theory Fitness, ie., you'll get a more worthwhile workout if you spend time in the "orange" zone, which is usually designated Heart Rate Zone 4. (Zone 5 is usually shown in "red," and constitutes the athlete's maximum effort.)

Needless to say (I hope), neither Strava nor Orange Theory Fitness innovated this approach to working out. Targeting Heart Rate Zone 4 a few times per week has been a regular part of heart rate zone training for as long as people have been grouping their heart rates into "zones."

A year ago, as I built up my aerobic capacity, I noticed that over time workouts that covered the same distance and speed were getting "easier" from the standpoint that my average heart rate was getting lower. I might have run 5 miles at 6:45/mile pace every day for a month, but at the beginning of the month I'd spend 10 minutes, say, in Zone 4, whereas at the end of the month I might have only spent 1 or 2 minutes in that zone. This signifies an increase in my aerobic fitness level, but not the fitness of my legs. More on that in a bit.

In order to get at that information last year, I had to watch my Heart Rate Zone diagrams on my Garmin Connect app. Every day, I'd check the bar graph and visually confirm where my average heart rate was going. It was imprecise, but close enough for rock and roll. To improve on that, I may have graphed maximum heart rate during exercise over time, grouping by similar distances, and checked for a downward-sloping trend line. That's not impossible, of course, but it is a little convoluted.

Strava's Relative Effort score works much better. Charting that one number over time gives you insight into how your training is progressing. Indeed, this is the graph that Strava calls your "Fitness" graph. Remember, Relative Effort involves the total amount of time you spend in each Heart Rate Zone, so even if you only spend all your time in Zone 1, 10 minutes is worth more than 5 minutes. So it combines both aerobic effort and total time spent training, which also functions as a proxy for weekly mileage.

Thus, if your aerobic fitness improves, but you do not increase your weekly mileage, then you could plausibly see your Fitness level drop, since you'll either spend less time in higher Heart Rate Zones, or less total time exercising (since you'd be running the same number of miles faster). The only way to increase your Fitness level (that's capital-F Fitness, ie. Strava's "Fitness" number) is to run more miles or run the same number of miles in higher Heart Rate Zones (or both).

Strava's website isn't good at explaining this at all! They give you general information about Relative Effort, heart rate zones, and "Power" (for cyclists), but they don't have any explanation that brings it all together so that you can use your personal Fitness chart. If I hadn't have figured it out, I likely would have cancelled my premium Strava subscription, since without a good explanation, the data is essentially useless. Chalk another one up to the uselessness of the way our data is served back to us by the tech industry.

No, that's not quite fair. Relative Effort is a really good number -- for once, we've been given something that is actually highly useful. Unfortunately, it's just not presented in a way that is readily usable to anyone except people like myself, data geeks who are already quite accustomed to probing the data deeply.

Hopefully the above explanation helps you more than Strava's online materials.